Commentary | grouperlab

October 22, 2013

Who Do You Think You Are?

Well, sometimes you get stuck on a theme. There have been several topics that have been at the forefront of my thinking over the past month, coming largely from the experience at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) Annual Meeting in San Diego. Although there were only two current GROUPERs there, I did get to interact with a number of former students, as well as others who sought me out and seemed truly eager to interact with me during the meeting. In that light, I thought about naming this entry, “Back from Cali”. However, after reading the song lyrics, I decided that maybe I didn’t want to reference the song by Slash (even though Axl Rose, the lead singer of Guns N’ Roses, is originally from Lafayette, IN). How about “Back to Cali”? No, the LL Cool J lyrics aren’t suitable either. Even becoming snarky didn’t help. “Title of the Entry” reminded me immediately of the song by DaVinci’s Notebook. So, yes, I am aware of a song reference above. Apparently, I can’t escape it.

So, what was so important that I now have all of this music in my head? Well, it was a great room, with a wonderful view, but it wasn’t just about the view, or even the boat.

One thing I noticed frequently is that the capacity for positive effect that one may have on others should not be trivialized. I’m not always aware of this, and the meeting in San Diego was a great reminder of the power of the effect. Three former GROUPERs (and one honorary GROUPER) are now involved with the Society in positions of leadership. Sandra Garrett is on the HFES Executive Council with me; members of the Technical Program Committee for 2013 included Michelle Rogers (Workshops) and Erik Wakefield (Product Design) as well as Ron Boring (Interactive Sessions and Posters). Let me mention Erik for a moment. When I first started working with him, he was working in the College of Technology, with what seemed to be a bizarre idea—let’s have sports scores and updates that can be pushed, real time, to someone’s mobile device. Except that this was 2005-06, before iPhone and Galaxy smartphones. He got the project done, graduated, got a job, and… developed. First in one company, then another, and then another, with HFES as his primary professional affiliation. He’s a senior engineer now, and working on some cool projects. When I saw him in San Diego, I noticed the difference, and mentioned it. And I said that I was proud of how he’d developed. Apparently, that had an effect—he went out of his way to mention it in one of his status updates (check on October 1, 2013). And that’s what got me thinking. We can have an effect that we don’t recognize, until someone points it out to us.

In my previous entry, “Eaten up with Curiosity,” I mentioned how much I was affected as an adolescent by the Rudyard Kipling story about Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Well, as it turns out, the Chuck Jones Gallery was just a few blocks away from the hotel, right in the midst of the Gaslamp District. I passed the gallery nearly every day, and Thursday evening, decided that I simply had to stop by. I confess that I took along a young colleague who had been expressing the desire and enjoyment of engaging in conversation and challenge; although it’s hard (and a bit arrogant) to simply wake up one morning to say, “I think I’m going to mentor that person today,” I did truly enjoy helping and encouraging them to consider their capability and career path from a variety of perspectives. So, in any case, we stopped by the Gallery, just for me to explore what might be there. And, behold, in one of the smaller rooms of the gallery, was a picture of Rikki. Actually, a production cel. A nice piece of animation history. So, there was a bit of passion expressed, moderated by a sense that such things were still beyond me.

Detail of Rikki cel. Copyright, Chuck Jones Entertainment

Who was Rikki? Just a pet? Or the hero of an epic confrontation, sung into history? Again, this is an entry about who we think we are. Sometimes we forget, or get stuck in a past version of who we might have been at some point in the past. I tend to call that past version “the ramen-eating guy in my head”. As an undergrad (and somewhat as a grad student), I was always watching every penny; once, when I found a $20 bill on the street in a puddle, I rejoiced—that was food for a month! This was someone desperate to show he could belong, that he could do something of note in the academic environment. Thirty years later, that ramen-eating guy still shows up sometimes. I have to remind myself that’s not where I am now. I have students eager to work with me. Former students greet me, and are thrilled to show me their new business cards. Others whom I never would have guessed knew about me seem honored to meet me; they’ve heard such wonderful stories about me. How I treat them now may not seem like much, but it can have a tremendous effect on their life and future. Who knows which young and eager student will become the next leader of our field?

These are lessons that I am very pleased to learn, with importance for my life both now and into the future. I thank all those who helped me with these insights and learnings.

Excuse me. I have to open a package from San Diego. It’s a reminder never to underestimate who we are. Rikki has arrived.

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September 15, 2013

Eaten up with Curiosity

The motto of all of the mongoose family is “Run and find out,” and Rikki-Tikki was a true mongoose.

–Rudyard Kipling

We find ourselves in the midst of a new academic semester, with the variety of challenges that face us in terms of schedules, task demands, and burdens both voluntarily and involuntarily shouldered. In one sense, it is as it always has been; but for each individual, it may be the very first time of an experience that defines and influences the remainder of one’s life. I have been thinking about this with the current configuration of GROUPER, and the need to help students make progress on existing dissertation topics or create new ones. This is not always an easy task, and though I have gone through this process over 50 times (with over 30 MS students and 14 PhD students advised, plus the students whom I have assisted in various less formal ways) on this side of the desk, there are always elements worth learning and improving.

Maybe it is simply the number of times that an issue presents itself within the period of a few weeks that it becomes more salient, and the gap between what is and what could be becomes more evident. Let’s assume that it may be no more than that, although a friend of mine was just mentioning today how there can be periods when one becomes much more open to insight and jumps in one’s self-learning. But there has been something about the question, “What should I do for my research?” that has struck me in very different ways this fall than in the past. I am asking myself different questions about my own research and career pathways; I am reminded of writings and insights from when I first arrived at Purdue. And of course, in the senior project design course, there is always the sense of importance to get the students—so used to textbook problem configurations and well-organized linkages between the information given and the equation to use—to start creating for themselves a system definition and sense of their own active participation in defining the problem to solve as a necessary part of being an engineer. And as an engineer myself, such gaps between what is and what could be are always met in my head with, “What do we do about it?”

And yet, there was something that I couldn’t quite bridge on my own in the conversations with the members of the lab. Where does one go to get ideas? How does one start the organization of facts and methods and tasks that gets one from classroom student to nascent researcher? Over the past month, I began to see that it was not just as simple as a statement in our “1:1 meetings” (as the nearly weekly individual meetings I have with all of members of the lab are known) to go figure out an interesting question. Interestingly enough, this recognition for me comes from a couple of sources, as I am again reminded that I don’t seem to approach the world in a way that is like most of those around me. Apparently, there are graduate seminars taking place in departments around the country (not just engineering departments, but bench sciences, literature, philosophy, sociology…) where students are encouraged and instructed to read through a bunch of journal papers or monographs or book chapters and determine which questions still required further study. (For the record, I took such seminars myself: it’s how I first learned, in 1985 and 1986, of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on cognitive strategies or the cultural specificity of the fundamental attribution error. I loved those papers. I just didn’t define my dissertation that way.)

Benson Snyder, in the 1960s and 1970s, discussed a critical issue affecting higher education, one that has come to be known as “the hidden curriculum”. (The “hidden curriculum” of the book’s title and premise is the informal sociological and socialization process of how and when to learn, not just what to learn.) This book seems to have had a very significant effect on me—not just because I have read through it multiple times (I still own a copy of the 1973 edition of the book), but because I can now see that much of the curriculum I experienced at MIT was shaped in part by the studies Snyder reports of students there 20 years prior. As I am teaching undergraduate statistics again after several years away from teaching it (but never far away from using it), I am also freshly sensitized to the processes of how to learn, and not just what. And this is how I started to recognize some of what I was finding vaguely concerning in the lab.

As an undergrad, one of the most telling philosophies of innovation and excellence I ever heard was one that was directly told to me as to why I had so much latitude in organizing my activities for my work-study job. “I’ve found that it’s best to give good people resources, and then get out of their way.” For me, that was an excellent and empowering approach, since I was never at a loss for ideas or novel approaches or unusual ways of thinking (at least ways deemed unusual by teachers or professors). In fact, I recently came to think about this as something I found exceptionally compelling in a cartoon I saw as an adolescent: Chuck Jones’ animated version of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, narrated by Orson Welles. Rikki is perpetually curious, and fiercely protective, and powerful in ways that are belied by his small size and friendly interactions. But isn’t everyone curious in this way of mongooses? Isn’t everyone driven to “run and find out”? Isn’t that part of the essential “inside” of every researcher?

No, says the hidden curriculum. Students are socialized to learn which questions are the “right” questions, and these questions are “best” defined in an outside-in way. The existing corpus defines the way the field is configured, and thus how new questions should be approached. But wait… 60 years ago, we didn’t have plate tectonics or the cognitive revolution—just working from existing papers published in 1953 wouldn’t have gotten you there, and certainly wouldn’t have gotten you accepted within the “standard” configuration. The same is true with statistical process analysis or scientific project management 100 years ago, or pharmacy or aerodynamics 150 years ago, or electrical and thermodynamic processes 250 years ago. And yet, my learning and research now derives from all of those innovations. Someone has to move beyond the standard, outside-in framework, and be ready to do the new work and meet the new challenges (and face the inevitable questions and criticisms that such an approach will engender).

It’s obvious to me now that it takes a lot more than a brief instruction to a graduate student to think in terms of the problems in the world of task environments, and interacting with people who live in those task environments. (Although an introvert, I find it natural and obvious to talk to someone about the challenges of their work. It’s easier for me than making other types of small talk.) I begin to wonder, though—have I been assuming that, just by osmosis or creating a supportive environment, anyone and everyone will be “eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity,” as Kipling put it? Might they need more help than that?

If you were expecting an answer to these questions… sadly, you will have to wait with me for that. I’ve asked the lab to help me understand what I’m doing that’s different, and how the hidden curriculum has affected and shaped them up to this point (although I didn’t ask it of them quite that way). But at the very least, asking the question is an important part of the process, and an essential element of making progress. There are cobras threatening the bungalow of higher education… bringing in and raising a mongoose is not a bad idea.

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June 28, 2013

Communication and Documentation (longer, connection-enhanced version)

Communication and Documentation

[I am feeling a bit like Chuck Lorre, the producer for several extremely popular television series, including the The Big Bang Theory (TBBT). Chuck has “vanity cards” which appear very briefly at the end of each episode of the shows. These vanity cards express Chuck’s perspectives, insights, and fevered rants on a variety of topics, and basically act like a blog. Since I record TBBT quite extensively (any similarities I have to Sheldon Cooper will be, and have been, hotly contested), I have gotten good at pausing the recording to read the card. Every once in a while, the card makes some reference to censoring, but with a website address to indicate where you can read the uncensored version of the card. When I first created the “Communication and Documentation” entry for the Indiana Space Grant Consortium Director’s Blog / Notes, it was pointed out that it was long and tangential and wouldn’t appeal to some of the readers. Well, in Chuck Lorre fashion, I edited the blog entry for that audience, but here’s the full version. Why? It’s GROUPER—so, it’s because I can. And those of you in GROUPER will recognize Karim and know why Shannon and Weaver are important. So there. –BSC]

“Document your code!”

This is a lesson I remember from my first computer programming course as a college frosh, now more than 30 years ago. The language was FORTRAN, and the computer was a PDP 11/44 [*] but the lessons were the same. If you didn’t provide enough comments in your code for the instructor to understand what your logic was intended to accomplish, or what the variables meant, or what that subroutine was for, you got points off. The essential message was not subtle: no matter how good a job you think you did, you haven’t done the whole job unless you’ve effectively documented it. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had substantial reminders of the importance of those lessons of communication and documentation.

Since the Affiliates’ Meeting in April, the INSGC staff have been trying to upgrade our processes and activities, and bringing onboard a new set of student interns for the summer. Part of this comes from our Affiliates’ survey of communications with the Central Office. Although the overall responses were excellent (from the perspective of demonstrating to NASA that we take our performance seriously and assess it regularly), there were some areas of concern (from the perspective of continuous improvement and achieving a model of excellence). It’s clear that we could use our website to better advantage, and thus that is a priority for us this summer. Angie has reported a much more timely and useful set of responses to our requests for reporting, due in part to our more clear presentations of what, when, and why we need those reports to meet our NASA grant reporting and documentation obligations. Wow… we can get that much more just by being more explicit about what we’re looking for, and how we need to use it?

Effective communication is a tricky thing. Some people like their documentation “spiced up” a little bit; others just want the immediate facts, in order, with an agenda of what will be covered and how many minutes are associated to each fact. I just had two conversations this weekend highlighting these challenges. On Friday, I had dinner with one of my former students, who recently started a new job at a major hospital as a quality engineering and improvement manager. He noted that some of the physicians and others at the hospital were frustrated with some of his meetings, because they couldn’t see how, or whether, there was a point to the meeting and what they were supposed to recognize and respond to that point. (Interesting: that was, almost verbatim, one of the comments from our Affiliates’ survey.) He said that those people would have found our research lab meetings intolerable, but he then took the feedback as an indication to simply write down what he already had in his head and give it a more formal structure as a meeting agenda. I have had to learn the same lesson in our INSGC Central meetings and those with Dawn and Angie—it’s the agenda that helps focus time and understanding, and improves advanced preparation.

What level of communication works for you? A friend of mine commented on my software commenting style over the weekend, because I was the only person they’d known who actually used “emotion” and eloquent language structures in their code [†]comments. On the one hand, there is a big world of language out there, and it’s nice to be able to use it well and communicate richly. On the other hand, one doesn’t want to turn into Dennis Miller as the color commentator for Monday Night Football, making snarky or esoteric literary references that even your colleagues don’t understand, when all they wanted to say was that it was good that the guy in the blue uniform tackled that guy in the white uniform. Do people find your style amusing and intelligent, or obscure and elitist? This is an important question when you’re trying to do public outreach and engagement for the general population. There are lots of different audiences (faculty and students who receive awards, administrators who want to know effectiveness of campus cost sharing, people who stop you on the street and ask you questions about airspace utilization), and I want to learn how to connect with them all.

Is this where I mention that one of our primary ways of regular communication with our affiliates, partners, and friends is the INSGC Director’s Blog? I try to put together a new blog entry every month or so, and use it to communicate some of our strategic concerns and general oversight topics. Great, right? Except that Dawn told me a few days ago that people don’t look at the blog entries. (That is the point of website analytics—is anyone actually receiving the message you’re sending?) Well, if we never updated the blog, that would be the expectation. Or, if it was assumed that nothing important ever showed up there. But what if I said that the best way to see what we’re planning for (and why) will show up first, or best, or most explicitly, in that Director’s Blog? Would that get more visits? Perhaps, but the goal of the blog is not more visits. It’s to communicate more effectively with our constituents.

According to information theory (as developed by Bell Laboratory researcher Claude Shannon and MIT professor Norbert Weiner), communication includes a sender, a transmission channel, and a receiver. There have to be several effective elements of good communication: the sender has to send a message that is meaningful to the receiver; the channel must be able to support that message; there has to be a minimum of noise or signal loss to distort the message; there has to be enough redundancy of the message so that the receiver understands the intent of the message even if some of it gets lost. (This seems very tangential to the point of anything else relevant for Space Grant Directors. However, it’s actually part of my research background and training. For me, the analysis of communication effectiveness is a social and technical engineering problem, and not just a management or persuasion issue. Remember, the message is based in part on the context of the sender as well as the context of the receiver. I’m trying to explain more of my context in a more explicit way. Any resemblance to Dennis Miller’s football color commentary is accidental.)

So, what next? Over the rest of the summer, expect additional upgrades to our communications: not just in the use of the available technologies, but in our strategies, messages, and references. This is a critical point in Space Grant evolution, and I believe that one of the ways that INSGC will succeed in the future is to be a powerful and effective source of communication and documentation of STEM engagement in the State of Indiana.

[*] The specifics here are only to suggest that I have been a geek for a very long time. Some of you may fondly remember coding in FORTRAN, or even what a PDP is. If you don’t, just think of it as part of that quaint long-ago time when there were pay phones that people used coins to operate when they weren’t at home to access their permanently wired landline phone.

[†] Yes, these are the sorts of friends I spend my time with. We talk about styles of software comments, and mathematical models of information exchange in company meetings, and the use of multi-dimensional graphs to understand social dynamics. Don’t judge. It works for us.

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April 15, 2013

Comings and Goings

It’s been highly eventful in GROUPER over the past month, since the beginning of Purdue’s Spring Break. We’re really proud to announce that Natalie Benda, who had just submitted a blog entry to the site (“Bringing Sexy Back“), has won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. This is one of the most prestigious awards for graduate students, and highlights both her unique development and her engagement with society to influence the impact of research. Congratulations, Natalie! We certainly hope you’re back here soon!

Members of the lab defined Prof. Caldwell’s travel schedule as “March Madness,” which almost exactly matched the length (and complexity) of the NCAA Tournament. On March 1, when the women’s Big Ten and other tournaments were starting up, BSC was in Washington, DC. Since then, he visited Irvine, CA; London, UK (for the Global Grand Challenges Summit); San Diego, CA; and Shanghai, Nanjing, and Suzhou, China, before arriving in Seattle on April 8 — the day that Louisville won the men’s championship. You may hear from BSC more soon.

In addition, Prof. Caldwell was escorted through much of his China visit by LIU Linyan, who was a visiting scholar to Purdue and GROUPER from the Nanjing University of Science and Technology. Returning to Shanghai only hours after Prof. Caldwell’s arrival, Linyan (and her husband) were invaluable and gracious in hosting and translating in settings as varied as Nanjing restaurants and Tongli historical museums. We’ll miss Linyan, who also provided us with this message summarizing her experience:

It was a wonderful time since I became a member of GROUPER. Before I came to Purdue, I imaged the guys in the GROUPER, now I still can remember the day I came to this lab for the first time. Liang was the first person I met; she helped me with the registration. Then I met two guys just out of lab (I spent six month in the lab, studying, meeting , etc.), Jeremi and Omar. They were so kind and helped me a lot. In that week we had a GROUPER gather, I met all of the GROUPERs. We had Chinese food in a Chinese restaurant. I felt so warm.

During the six months I was in lab, we had GROUPER meeting nearly every two weeks in the lab, and we had personal meeting in Prof’s office. Every personal meeting, when discussed with Prof. Caldwell, you could find something new and should think more. Thank you, prof. Caldwell, the meeting, the books and paper you recommended helped me learning and getting new knowledge and enlarge my research field.

Time goes so quickly, when I recall the memory in GROUPER. I am in China now. I can remember everything so clearly like it happened yesterday. Omar took me to ITAP to modify my password and showed me how to use the scanner. In the noon, I was having lunch and listening to Jake’s music; the pin (GROUPER pin), Marissa’s birthday, G4 in Natalie’s apartment, G4 in Prof. Caldwell’s house, and the pink poster we were drawing…. I will never forget the nice experience and I will treasure the pin (GROUPER pin) forever, because I am a member of GROUPER.

Thanks, GROUPERs. Prof. Caldwell, Marissa, Liang, Jeremi, Jake, Omar, Natalie, Kelly, Mina, Siobhan.

We’re all pulling for Siobhan as she recovers from her accident last month. Things were a bit scary for a while, and remain tough. As I mentioned to her and her family, Siobhan’s caught a crab affecting her race plan. We’ll be getting back up to speed, one stroke at a time. The most important thing is that such events help us to recognize that there are more important elements to our individual and shared existence than p-values and the number of citations in a given research paper. We still emphasize the quality of our work, but even now, we can see direct impacts of what we do on individual quality of life issues–including those of our own members.

Congratulations also to Jake and Marie Viraldo, who have added to their team; Marie gave birth to Jacob Osborn last Thursday. Once again, life sometimes trumps lab. I may not want to always admit it, but having been a grad student with various intrusions of critical life events (birth of a child, life-threatening illness of a significant other, drastic shifts in research, unexpected opportunities and setbacks), I am sensitive and aware of how this is not just school, but one’s developing professional life. For those of you just embarking on it, I am sympathetic. (Not always soft or fuzzy, but sympathetic.)

Next time, perhaps a bit more about lab turnover… Jeremi finished her thesis, and Marissa will be finishing soon. There’s always more to mention, because we’re never done.

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March 9, 2013

Bringing Sexy Back (A Post from Natalie)

Instead of just hearing from me, we’re starting to add more posts from more members of the lab, and from more perspectives. The first is from Natalie Benda, who is now a happy and proud GROUPER alumna. Here’s an insight from her:

My journey to Purdue begins in Dubuque, IA, “the home of America’s river”. (Yes, that is what the sign says when you cross into my county). When I was younger, I always thought I would end up going into medicine. I come from a family where you were the odd one out if you did not work in the healthcare field. Knowledge of medicine was a pre-requisite for the majority of the conversations that when on at the “grown-ups” table when I was growing up. My parents even met in a hospital where they have worked for a combined total of about sixty years. So, naturally I chose to study engineering in college. That makes sense, right? No? Well, it will eventually.

In high school, when discussing my prospects for secondary education, many times I heard something along the lines of, “You’re good at math and science, you should be an engineer.” It must have stuck at some point, because I started to do my about it. I found the descriptions and coursework for computer, electrical, civil, mechanical and even biomedical engineering, were less than intriguing. I did not want to be in a lab or at a computer all day tinkering away with components. In the words of my favorite mermaid, I wanted to be where the people were! So, when I came across material on industrial engineering, which emphasized the human aspect of engineering, it was a no-brainer.

With a newly found excitement for my presumed, I began the search for a school. My criteria – get out of Iowa but remain within driving distance, and find a large university with a strong reputation for industrial engineering. The three main schools I looked at were Northwestern, the University of Illinois at Urbana and Purdue. My junior year of high school, my mother and I trekked through a blizzard to visit Purdue on what was probably one of the coldest days of the year. I wish I could give a non-cliché account of all of the wonderful qualities that drew me to Purdue during this first visit, but I can’t. It just felt like the right fit, and I never looked back.

Fast-forward to my sophomore industrial engineering seminar. Although I was excited about getting out of freshman engineering classes and into my chosen discipline, I didn’t feel I had found that extra-curricular activity niche that many of my classmates had. Until one day, our seminar speaker gave a presentation regarding opportunities for industrial engineers in healthcare. Do you remember my rant about being destined to work in healthcare earlier? Is it starting to make a little more sense?

So, after their speech, I approached the speaker to learn more about how I could get involved in healthcare engineering at Purdue. It turned out she was a member of GROUPER. As many of you know, GROUPER works in many areas besides healthcare, however as Dr. C. says it is the new, sexy field for IE’s. This healthcare component was what initially drew me to the lab. What kept me there was breaking down the barriers of traditional engineering and finding ways to connect people and systems through communication. If you can’t tell by my quoting Disney movies and titling my entry after a Justin Timberlake song, I do not like to be subject to societal norms. And GROUPER is far from the norm.

In my two plus years as a GROUPER, I performed many tasks from managing the lab’s schedule to statistical analysis supporting Ph. D. research, and managed to stumble across some research of my own in the process. After organizing the lab’s document library, I found I had a special interest in chronic disease adherence. So, with the help of Dr. C. and the Medication Safety Network of Indiana, I designed a study that analyzed information flow between patients and pharmacists in pharmacy consultations for congestive heart failure medications. I could give you a dry, statistical run-down of the results, but for the sake of the blog I’ll get to the point: the results of the study evidenced the critical part that the pharmacist plays in patient medication safety by capturing potential adverse events the pharmacist was able to detect and prevent. The project is on hold for the moment, but now that we know these potential adverse events are there, couldn’t we find where they stem from? Could we in turn find the root cause of more adverse events that the pharmacist may not be able to prevent and discover ways to build a safer medication system?

Since my graduation from Purdue in December, I have begun a new job in Washington, D.C. as a research assistant for the National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare. In my first few weeks at NCHFH, I have worked on a number of projects that include validating the use of a serious game as an assessment tool (yes, I play video games at work), methods of reducing blood stream infections in dialysis patients and representing communication patterns through #socialnetwork mapping (okay, not that kind of social network, but you get my point).

The project that will be taking up the majority of my time is a classic information alignment problem. We will be working to help software vendors design electronic health record systems that facilitate providers’ ability to achieve “meaningful use” systems. The Office of the National Coordinator is strongly pushing the principles of user centered- and safety enhanced-design. To facilitate this, members of academia have developed a number of tools for the vendors to promote usability. As one could imagine, healthcare professionals, academic researchers and commercial software designers do not exactly speak the same language. Our goal is to help get to a place where these vastly different groups can understand one another and work towards the common goal of designing systems to deliver safer, more effective patient care. Thus far it is turning out to be a fascinating challenge, and my work with GROUPER has left me well prepared.

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November 29, 2012

Inputs and Outputs

It’s not a great time to be a student–end of semester exams, project papers, and completing all of that work that seemed infinitely manageable back in October. It’s not a great time to be a faculty member–thesis drafts to read, letters of recommendation and proofreading students’ research statements fall on top of grant proposal deadlines and all that grading. So, it seems reasonable to be both a bit gentle, and a tad more explicit in clarifying the difference between “nice to have” and “required”. Some extra data, or a couple more days to work on that draft of the term paper is nice to have. What’s a challenge at the end of November is recognizing what is required, and how to get to all that is necessary in the too-little time available.

Most academics want to get grants to do their research. That’s not an easy process, and the competition grows in complexity and sources of frustration. Whether it be a development contract from a company, or a research grant from a governmental funding agency, the folks reading the proposal want to know “Who Cares” and “Why Should I Spend the Time to Read This?” They don’t know about what you meant to say, and they probably aren’t in your field. It’s your responsibility to communicate what’s so cool and new and shiny to you, to other people who may not even care until you show them why it’s valuable and critical and efficient to help them in what they do every day. A challenge at the best of times; a burden worthy of Atlas if you’re trying to write five proposals in two weeks to different types of organizations. Faculty usually talk about funding as an input measure (“Congratulations! You got the grant! Now what are you going to publish, which students will graduate, and what new things will come out of that lab that other people also want to use?”) . It’s also an output measure, of course: “I wrote nine proposals, and two of them got funded! I’m a star!” (Actually, that is kind of true. Funding rates for proposals from the most competitive agencies are often described as being in the 6-12% range. Hitting on 22% of your proposals would be good. Like Ted Williams in baseball, hitting on 40% of your tries would make you a Hall-of-Famer.) Either way, there is a big lag between the pain of creation and the success of the award. (Maybe just long enough to forget how much it hurts.)

But faculty have another set of inputs and outputs: their students. There was a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the evolution from being your professor’s advisee to being his or her peer. I was able to send this to the current GROUPERs, and even to my five most recent PhDs. I’ve even gotten a reply already–the start of a thread. This helps me feel good about the students as outputs–but I can still gloss over the importance of inputs. Not just the students as inputs (you need good material), but what we can do to get the student where they want to go.

Unfortunately, Natalie is leaving us in a few weeks: she’s graduating with her BS. Although an undergrad, she’s been one of the more experienced members of the lab for the past two years, helping to keep us aligned and sequenced (she’s been the project management software goddess). Student as input, student as person needing inputs, student as providing inputs… (that’s also modeling project we’re working on as well, within the SMELT stream). The greatest reward though, was the news we’ve gotten over the past week or so. At the HFES Annual Meeting back in October, I met a researcher from an organization doing research on human factors in healthcare. Have I got a student for you, I said. She’s already developed her own research study. She is fantastic as part of my lab. She wants to work in this area. And now, Natalie gets to announce that she got a job! And then she said that being part of GROUPER was a large part of how that happened… as well as my work that went into it.

GROUPER is an input into the students’ lives and professional evolution? What I’m doing is a transformation that gives someone a better outcome, a stronger trajectory, a more favorable future? OK, maybe that is worth it, and a great reward that turns into inputs for the next cycle. That, and a few extra hours’ sleep. And maybe some visits by the proposal writing muse.

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October 4, 2012

Lab (Cleaning) Party

I find the weeks around the September Equinox fascinating and especially important for me. At this time of year, change is evident, and rapid, and significant. The weather shifts from sultry, to sunny, to stormy, and maybe back again a few more times. The academic semester is now in full intensity: the students are busy with multiple assignments submitted, which of course affects my workload as I try to grade them. And of course, my birthday is a personal milestone event, with greetings and connections to family and friends.

This year was an especially important and life-defining birthday… no, wait. The calendar marks a date. But, my sense of where I am—in my career, in the life of the lab, about my own experience—is defined more by how I feel in the morning during tai chi and while eating breakfast than by a focus on how many revolutions around the Sun the Earth has managed since I first appeared. So, last week’s big lab event to mark my birthday? A party. A lab party. Well, actually, it was a lab cleaning party. Boxes of unnecessary and outdated materials were sorted and removed. Non-functional computers were disconnected. Tables were rearranged into a new and more functional configuration. This was a very helpful meeting.

Hold on. Are you telling me that GROUPER is just about room arrangements? Of course not. There are five research projects going on right now. There’s two PERCH projects (pharmacist-based information flow for congestive heart failure patient prescription filling; patient information flow and expertise using electronic medical records); a SMELT project (alignment of learning outcomes for first- and second-year engineering courses); and a new DOPHIN / CORAL project looking at information presentation to control room operators. The fifth project used to be looking at information concentrations and dynamics of information- and task-based elements of emergency responder situation awareness and event response. This could be a great idea for simulation-based human factors engineering. Except for a few tiny details. It’s a non-equilibrium decision making and performance task. With multiple scales of information dynamics. And the requirements for several years of data that aren’t available. Although there are examples of dissertations that had unexpected complexity or challenge, I believe it is one of the advisor’s responsibilities not to allow (or worse yet, intentionally create) a situation where the student finds themselves caught in a bad project. As the Zheng Lab students say, “I want to graduate in less than 5 years… I want a job and I want to be free.” So, let’s make an environment that helps that happen. (And let’s shift an impossible dissertation to just a challenging and interesting and valuable one.)

Somewhere along the way, I came to believe that a university should be about people working together to explore what has not yet been seen, and translate it across disciplines and times for others to understand. An advanced degree is not just about working on a more obscure detail for some research area that no one else cared to study. It’s not about following exactly the same program areas as everyone else, because that’s the “hot funding area” or because “everyone in the field is working that problem”. What do we really mean when we say that we want a PhD? The humor, but too often the true experience, suggests that it’s just about “Piled Higher and Deeper”. (You’ll have to wait for us to talk more about how GROUPERs learn from robots on Mars.) But Ph.D. means Doctor of Philosophy. One who teaches how to think, and think different.

But, back to the birthday, and the lab party. This group is coming together. The lab looks and feels better, more ready for the year’s work. There is lots to do, and I am thrilled to recognize that I feel more engaged and enthused to do it. The trajectory of one’s life and career is often described in a particular way, and the most recent birthday is often associated with dirges and black crepe and funereal humor about negative second derivatives regarding hills. (Okay, they don’t really say it that way.) However, the fun of the lab party is that it was one of new preparation. New opportunity. We’re just getting started. Chronological age aside, the past two weeks have been about a joyous recognition. Since I’ve now spent a dozen years in Indiana (another recent milestone), it’s easy for me to hear John Mellencamp songs on the radio and in my days. But one is certainly appropriate here: Your Life is Now

It is your time here to do what you will do…

In this undiscovered moment,

Lift your head up above the crowd.

We could shake these worlds,

If you would only show us how…

Your life is now.

Thanks for the cake, folks. The frosting was delicious.

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September 27, 2011

GROUPERs on GROUPER

BC Intro:

After the GROUPER lab meeting on September 8, and in concert with my own blog entry, I asked both the continuing and new students to consider their experience in learning about life in the lab. There were several styles of response, from undergraduates and graduates, new and continuing, that describe GROUPER in ways that I couldn’t. So, let’s just hear from them.

The first commentary comes from Jeremi, who actually created her own blog post at: http://jeremilondon.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/grouper-lab-__-chess-club-__/.

Next is Marissa:

School is back in session and with that comes new students. There are a few new graduate students who are currently trying to figure out if GROUPER is right for them. At the most recent lab meeting, Dr. Caldwell decided it would be best for the current GROUPERs and the “prospective” GROUPERs to bond over some pizza. One of the new graduate students asked me how I came to the conclusion that I wanted to study “information and knowledge sharing and nursing expertise coordination in healthcare”. I turned to him and empathized as I was in his exact predicament a year ago. I was trying to figure out whether or not GROUPER was right for me and also a specific research interest. I told this student that I was not one of those students who knew exactly from the age of five that I wanted to go to Purdue University and be a member of the GROUPER lab studying in the healthcare field. I was quite far from it. (I think when I was five I told my dad I wanted to be a ballerina.) The only things I knew when I sat in the GROUPER lab for the first time a year ago was that I wanted to study healthcare and that I enjoyed working with people and studying how they behave.

The GROUPER lab does not recruit one specific type of graduate student and quite frankly, the lab doesn’t even stick with just graduate students. Not all of our students have a main focus in industrial engineering and not all of the students are stellar at one particular component of industrial engineering. (The only common ground is that all lab members study how people get, share, and use information well.) When I joined the lab, there was one student studying space flight operations, one student studying first responders, and two students studying two separate components of the healthcare delivery system. Once I joined, two more students deemed GROUPER right for them. One was studying another unique component of healthcare and the other, like me, had no clue! Through the lab meetings during my first semester as a Boilermaker, two of my GROUPER labmates, Dr. Caldwell, and myself decided that we would write two papers for a conference simply because we had an interest in the two subjects of the papers. One of those papers became the basis for my research; I found the topic absolutely fascinating. Therefore, the above wordy description of my research was neither my idea nor Dr. Caldwell’s idea; in essence, it was GROUPER’s idea.

GROUPER is filled with diverse, forward-thinking overachievers. What makes us unique is that although we have very specific and different research topics, we are able to come together to talk about what we find interesting (or funny, controversial, frustrating, inspiring) in order to help each other, and even ourselves, find one’s niche.

A few words from Kelly:

As a new student to the GROUPER lab, I have had a lot of positive feelings toward the lab in the short amount of time I’ve been here. The collaboration that happens during the lab meetings is productive and beneficial, even to members who are not working on the project that is being discussed. Everyone is very welcoming and is not just willing to help, but happy to help. With the number of projects going on, it would seem that it would be hard to get the entire lab to come together and focus on helping the lab as a whole. But, this is not the case. Each person in the group wants everyone else to succeed and has the best interest of the lab at heart. The GROUPER lab has been so welcoming and helpful and I look forward to starting my own research and continuing to work with this group.

Finally (and fittingly), comments from Natalie:

Each time I explain my research project that analyzes information sharing and adherence in Congestive Heart Failure patients, I pause and wait, and without fail, the respondent utters some form of the question, “Oh, that’s interesting, but how is that engineering?” Explaining what GROUPER does, requires revamping the stereotypical definition of engineering. Yes, most engineers build, design, or formulate ‘things’. However, many people struggle to grasp the concept of engineering the intangible. GROUPER focuses on engineering information and communication in such a way that the system associated with the information is understandable for all users. We strive to bridge the gap between information and technology. If we cannot find a way to deliver this advanced technology on a consistent basis, what purpose does it serve?

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July 19, 2011

A commentary on PR

(OK–BC here, admitting to a shameless plug. I am running for an Executive Council seat in the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and while others have sent out “vote for me” messages, I thought it would make more sense if I made some commentary on what I was thinking about, so that people would have a clear indication of why they should–or shouldn’t–consider me. So, this is the text of that commentary.)

Good morning / afternoon, colleagues and friends. It’s a busy summer for everyone—so much so that I hope you won’t mind this belated reminder to make sure to vote for Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) Officers and Executive Council members… You have two votes to make for Executive Council; I hope you are willing to use one of them for me.

This is a time of challenges, not just for HFES, but for many broad areas of human factors practice, research, and society. It’s also a time for discussion and debate on how we might best meet those challenges. For instance, the HFES discussion list recently included a consideration of writing Congressional representatives to address proposed reductions in social and behavioral research funding; others suggested that this might not be an effective (or ergonomic!) strategy. If you are a US government employee, or at a university like mine with strict anti-lobbying concerns, you may not even see a letter to your Senator or Representative as a legitimate option for you. The Society must be able to address this range of perspectives, and demonstrate awareness that there are few simple solutions to organizational, social, and societal challenges, and we should avoid simplistic ones.

One issue that gives me frequent pause is one of effective communication and, for lack of a better term, “public relations (PR)”. In another part of my life, I manage NASA education, engagement, and scholarship / fellowship programs for the State of Indiana. I have been a space geek for most of my life; I forget that other people don’t get deeply involved in the richness of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education addressing the range of aerospace engineering and earth and space sciences. So, it’s especially surprising for me when I have people ask questions such as “Why are they cancelling NASA?” “Why is NASA preventing commercial space companies from working on vehicles?” “Couldn’t we just go to Mars now instead of wasting money on the Space Station?” Details aside, what causes me such surprise is that, although people are interested in this aspect of STEM in their lives, their understanding is highly limited—and really, whose fault is that? In other words, why does NASA need PR? Putting on my best human factors / macroergonomics hat, I know better than to just blame the user. We who do the rocket science have to stop assuming that the rest of the world will immediately understand it the way we do, with the priorities we have. PR is about learning those other priorities and understandings, and communicating our goals based on those criteria.

Although there are only a few thousand of us in HFES, I see some of the same concerns in play. Without question, HFES seeks to be a society that promotes research, and our research is intended to improve the quality of human lives. It sounds like an ideal area of application, investigation, and learning. Is it true that the public doesn’t care about human factors? I don’t know if I could go through a day of popular media and network television (especially not if I surf through the shopping channels) without a mention of “ergonomic” or “user design” or “safety” – the stuff we do all the time. But if the public doesn’t know who we are, or what we’re doing, or how, it probably isn’t a great place to start to complain about their limited understanding of STEM and direct them to an advanced textbook. (For much of the public, I am learning, any college level textbook is an “advanced textbook”.) Whether you elect me for Executive Council or not, this is an issue that we face, and especially for a small professional society in this economic and political and social setting, effective PR may be more than an afterthought or necessary evil. This is not just about the impact factor of this journal or the acceptance rate at that conference. Our contributions to society are more vital, and more subtle, than that. No matter what role any of us have in the Society, that is a task for all of us to address, a challenge for all of us to meet.

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Category: Commentary

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